1mo ago

LLM training bots are a plague

pod.geraspora.de Excerpt from a message I just posted in a #diaspora team internal f...

Excerpt from a message I just posted in a #diaspora team internal forum category. The context here is that I recently get pinged by slowness/load spikes on the diaspora* project web infrastructure (Discourse, Wiki, the project website, ...), and looking at the traffic logs makes me impressively angr...

Evidence for the DDoS attack that bigtech LLM scrapers actually are.

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14 comments

How feasible is it to configure my server to essentially perform a reverse-slow-lorris attack on these LLM bots?
If they won't play nice, then we need to reflect their behavior back onto themselves.
Or perhaps serve a 404, 304 or some other legitimate-looking static response that minimizes load on my server whilst giving then least amount of data to train on.
- The only simple possibles ways are:
  robot.txt
  rate limiting by ip
  blocking by user agent
  From the article, they try to bypass all of them:
  They also don't give a single flying fuck about robots.txt ...
  If you try to rate-limit them, they'll just switch to other IPs all the time. If you try to block them by User Agent string, they'll just switch to a non-bot UA string (no, really). This is literally a DDoS on the entire internet.
  It then become a game of whac a mole with big tech 😓
  ~~The more infuriating for me is that it's done by the big names, and not some random startup.~~ Edit: Now that I think about it, this doesn't prove it is done by Google or Amazon: it can be someone using random popular user agents
  
  I do believe there's blocklists for their IPs out there, that should mitigate things a little
- A possibility to game this kind of bots is to add a hidden link to a randomly generated page, which contain itself a link to another random page, and so one.: The bots will still consume resources but will be stuck parsing random garbage indefinitely.
  ~~I know there is a website that is doing that, but I forget his name.~~
  Edit: This is not the one I had in mind, but I find https://www.fleiner.com/bots/ describes be a good honeypot.
  
  maybe you mean this incident https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40001971
  
  This is it, thanks: https://www.web.sp.am/

14 comments